There aren't too many times I'm ashamed of anything that America does.  The current crying inside the automobile industry is one of those.  What we are witnessing as ordinary citizens who do not have a Union to protect us from the UAW is the single largest extortion demand in economic history.  Here is an industry who has had to give its products away for nearly a decade through employee pricing schemes, whose compensation at the worker level and executive level is beyond delusion, and whose entitlement and protectionist mentality should be heralded in a new book;  SELFISH- the UAW and the end of Automobiles.

I am sorry as a fellow human being for the economic suffering that is befalling and will continue to befall Michigan and its economic environment.  I am sorry that the executive leadership of those companies have for nearly three decades been asleep at the wheel of everything but their own bank accounts and pocketbooks.   I am sorry most of all, that the workers there have been so anesthesized by their world view and contracts that they've seen themselves as invulnerable to changes occurring in the world.  Most of all I'm sorry that the vast majority of them have elected to be taken care of instead of planning for their own future.

The President of the UAW and the Big Three Presidents remind me of a group of totally irresponsible, totally unaccountable school children who are coming up with various versions of "The Dog Ate My Homework".  Please tell me that the same company that is putting the GPS on my car is not the same company that ignored the warning signs of an industry in decline. 

 The only other industry that has proceeded with equal arrogance and blindness is the financial services industry and the Clubs of the past:  Lehman, Merrill, Goldman, and Morgan Stanley.  Not one person in any of those industries is offering but the most oblique of defenses for flying their organizational planes right into the ground.    They remind me of the airline crash in the Florida EverGlades a few years ago where every officer on the flight deck ignored the instrument panels trying to figure out whether the wheel light was burnt out or malfunctioning.  In the meantime, they flew the plane right into the ground.

My prediction is that what we've done with this cash flow infusion is just to postpone the inevitable.  The cash flow injection is to just make Christmas less miserable in a state where miserable is all it was going to be anyway.  In less than five years the industry is gone and it should be.  It is not profitable.  It is run by synchophants and thugs.  It is arrogant and its past is way bigger than its future.  Let's quit having anniversary parties and reflecting on how great it was.  It reminds of 60th wedding anniversary celebrations where the real thing to be celebrated is not love but the ability of human being to endure that much emotional pain for that long without committing suicide.

They will not succeed with their "green" strategy.  I've seen the early designs and even my grandfather, who was a lifelong Oldsmobile Afficianado would not be caught dead in them.  They are the same old clunker steel contraptions that now burn free range cow doody instead of oil.  The entire "green" thing is a bad road to go down.  Gas is the lowest its been in five years.  OPEC members have anal openings so tight you can't shoot a laser beam up them, and we are going to ride a Range Rover 10 miles with $5 gas over the option of driving a Ford, GM, Or Chysler "Green Thing" 100 miles on the same $5 gas.

I, candidly, as an American and a consumer do not care whether my car is made here or the Netherlands.  I am not planning on living in Michigan ever nor joining a Union.  I hate snow, snow jobs, and thuggery masquerading as brotherhood.Once upon a time we were a manufacturing economy.  Once upon a time we were a colony of Great Britain.  We've been neither for a long, long time.

Let's move on..